Voyage of a zumba instructor

I’ve been teaching Zumba for 6 months now, so I believe I am entitled to form an opinion on it. 🙂 Guilty as charged, I was totally sceptical about this well-sold concept of dance workout. “What’s the big fuss?” I thought outloud. Well the big fuss is, this concept does miracles! It makes people happy, positive, fit and addicted. 🙂

The first steps were a bit rocky for me, though not as rocky as they could have been if I had absolutely no experience in dance or workouts. But I’ve been out of teaching for a while so it took me a couple of weeks to get more relaxed and back in shape of course. Now, after a few months, I live for this. I have regular groups of girls, who are getting addicted with Zumba and want more when we collapse on the floor after our 60-minute workout. I see happy faces who are becoming my friends.

Now for all those, who still don’t know how this works, here’s a time-line of a Zumba instructor’s voyage:
1. You attend a class, feel good about it, don’t understand what’s the big deal and continue to do what you did before.
2. An instructors training comes in your town. You either know, the fitness center you work in needs zumba instructors, or they even don’t know they need them yet.
3. You attend an instructor’s training.
4. You teach your very first class (make it in a small friendly group first time, please, otherwise you’ll get eaten alive).
5. The first 6 weeks are ok, nothing special. Though you discover some new muscles that ache, which you were not even aware of before.
6. Then you receive your first praise. It feels good.
7. You start noticing people are coming back regularly.
8. This same people start wearing more colorfull and lighter clothes, no more black for them.
9. After 2 months they tell you, they lost weight since they started Zumba.
10. They become worried of what will we do in the summer, when gyms usually close down.
11. You teach at a Zumba marathon event. Wow, bigger crowd, love it.
12. Your wardrobe is already half Zumba branded. And you always wake up early in the morning, when the new apparel arrives.
13. Your class schedule is slowly filling and you are teaching more classes per day.
14. You start thinking on how to spare with energy in order to get through all those classes.
15. If you haven’t by now, this is appropriate time to attend another Zumba instructors training (either Basic 2, Toning or ZumbAtomic).
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